Haircare

A study of 1,042 schoolchildren found that natural Afro-textured hair reaches a length steady state within about a year of a haircut — because breakage catches up with growth. The apparent failure to grow is an equilibrium, not a deficit.

Laser hair removal sometimes grows hair instead of removing it. The reported incidence spans a factor of fifty, the meta-analysis has 97 percent heterogeneity, and the pooled data could not establish any link to skin type at all — which is the opposite of what everyone says.

A South African team measured the pH of 121 relaxers across 39 brands. No-lye was not gentler. Children’s formulas were not gentler. And 91 percent of the sodium hydroxide products were sold without the shampoo that stops the reaction.

FDA’s proposed ban on formaldehyde in hair smoothing products has slipped five times across five successive regulatory agendas — roughly 28 months backwards — and has still not published. Meanwhile a salon measurement study found blow-dry peaks of 3.47 ppm.

The figure quoted for how many Black women have CCCA comes from women photographed at six workshops, with no biopsies, in a study that also failed to find the relaxer association the number is usually deployed to prove.

Acne keloidalis nuchae accounts for somewhere between 0.45 and 13.6 percent of all dermatoses in people of African descent — a range wide enough to tell you nobody has a real number. It is not exclusively a Black condition either, and a 142-patient Hispanic cohort proves it.

The condition was named in 1968 after the thing everyone assumed caused it. The causal link never held up, the name was changed, and two generations of women were told a scarring hair loss was their own fault in the meantime.

A hazard ratio of 2.55 made headlines about Black women’s hair products. The cohort behind it was overwhelmingly white, found no difference by race, and recorded no brands or ingredients. The absolute numbers — 1.64 percent to 4.05 percent by age 70 — are the ones worth knowing, and almost nobody printed them.

Chebe powder has no peer-reviewed study I could reach. Rice water has ten, none of them clinical outcomes. African black soap has composition analysis and no trials. That is not a verdict on any of these practices — it is a verdict on who gets studied.

Pseudofolliculitis barbae affects somewhere between 45 and 83 percent of men who shave and have tightly curled hair. The standard advice makes it worse by design, and in 2025 the US military decided the problem was the men.